1561: Bias in Comparative Linguistics Mar 24, 2019

As mentioned in yesterday's post, comparative linguistics—or the method of comparing languages in order to understand the history of their developments—is not totally an exact science. This is particularly true because there is no standard or scale for seeing how languages will always change; one sound in one language can transform in a totally different way in another so the process can be described only after the fact. This means that looking for similarities in one language requires the linguist to have a good understanding of the whole language family, and if this is not the case there will be implicit bias.